Director Kenneth Branagh and Marvel Studios President, Kevin Feige, sat down at a round-table at Comic-Con 2010 to talk about bringing “Thor” to the big screen and finding the write tone for the film. Kenneth talks about why he has given his actors so much reading material to prepare for the film and Kevin goes on to talk about how he knew Kenneth was the right director for this film.

Q: Kenneth, it seems like you’re giving your cast members lots of reading material. Is this something that was helpful to you in the past?

Kenneth: It’s just to make sure, you start off saying “It’s not gonna be the usual thing.” And also, look for information anywhere; it doesn’t matter if you read a book this thick. Natalie, she read a book about a nuclear physicist, about the gal that was sort of, ousted from the discovery of DNA, Rosalind Franklin, she was the one that didn’t get the Nobel Prize: a brilliant, mid-century, British, physicist. Now, you may see none of that in Jane Foster, but she read a book this thick and came up with some great ideas that might be half a line in the movie but it just smacks like a peg into the ground of a different kind of reality and isn’t just about, “Oh he’s over there, he just did that!” You know, so it’s trying to say, you can do that, you can watch a TV show, it can be a picture, you can be in an art gallery, whatever. Let’s make it special, let’s make it our own, you can put your arms around the part that way.

Q: What was it like working on a film that exists in the shared universe that Marvel films do, how was that, bringing it to life?

Kenneth: That was the fun bit, Kevin will tell you, he’s the maestro of all of that. The fun thing is when you know, and go and see “Iron Man 2,” and you get some lines saying, “Clark has to get down to New Mexico, we have a bit of a problem down there.” And you know, WE’RE the problem! And we’ve got a couple of little nods heading Joe’s (Johnston) way from our picture. I went to see the set (of “Captain America”) the other week and I was thrilled. What was nice is, well I didn’t feel, you may have done it so brilliantly, I didn’t notice, but I didn’t feel like I had to think about it at all. I was Thor-centric and…

Kevin: The trick is that all the movies, and I say this all the time, all the movies have to stand on their own. If you need to watch all of them to understand any of them, we failed. But it also wouldn’t work if we didn’t have filmmakers like Ken and like Favreau and like Joe, and now Joss (Whedon), who are excited by that notion, who understand that their toes aren’t being stepped on, they’re telling the story and the movie they want to tell and we get enough of these pieces in that the baton can be passed to the next one. And they enjoy the idea, they enjoy that notion that they’re part of something bigger.

Q: Is “Thor” a bit of a tougher sell than the traditional guy in a costume? Since you’re dealing with possible Gods and how you represent that?

Kenneth: It’s interesting, and I think it’s right to say that it is a tricky tonal issue. We always talked early on about, you know, I’m there, for what it’s worth, to try and guide the tone and say, hey I think we should make a film, I was passionate about having a contemporary, Earth sequence in the movie. So I believe that, with the comics, we can live in both places, and people can travel to both places, potentially and we CAN find the tone. You’ve got to stay very honest, very truthful, and we hope that we’re doing that.

Q: How did you know that Kenneth was the right director for this project?

Kevin: There was no question about it. What it really was, knowing his background, knowing the amazing work that he’s done…what I didn’t know and what it took the phone calls and the meetings we had to find out, is what a fan he was of “Thor,” what a fan he was of this genre, of these movies, and we just started talking about movies and we had a similar notion of what these kinds of movies can and should deliver. And he clearly, I think he’s going to show what he can do.

Kenneth: I’m a total, I’m a movie geek, I’m there every weekend and it’s just totally and utterly a pleasure.

You can read more Thor cast interviews with Clark Gregg and Tom Hiddleston. Or check out the photo gallery of Chris Hemsworth playing Thor.